News

A new field course will be offered on campus this coming May.

Co-taught by Laurel Schut (College of Sustainability) and Paul Manning (Faculty of Agriculture), this course will explore the challenges and opportunities of measuring sustainability in a food context.

Why is measuring food sustainability important? We are becoming increasingly aware of the impacts that our food systems have on the sustainability of the planet, the livelihoods of our food producers, and equitable accessibility for individuals. Integrating the expertise of numerous faculty and community leaders, this field course explores how food sustainability is measured and evaluated across different disciplines. 

Daily hands-on, active, and experiential learning is emphasized throughout the course. The course activities and assessments range from agricultural biodiversity monitoring via beetle surveys to a summative design challenge exploring a possible solution to a food sustainability measurement.

Through this field course, we will critically evaluate a myriad of ways that we can measure food sustainability. We will use a purposefully broad definition of food sustainability, that is adaptable depending on the needs, interests, and values of affected parties. We will hear from and visit a wide variety of people working across a diverse cross-section of sustainability aligned to food. 

This course will be split between Halifax (5 days) and Truro (5 days). The course has a pre-requisite of 30-credit hours (10 courses) completed.

Please reach out to Paul Manning (paul.manning@dal.ca) for more information about the course.